Transformation

What I am slowly realizing is that my thinking needs to change at a very basic level.  In that last post about re-racking weights I began with the idea of creating or transforming a culture and ended with the realization that what most needed to be transformed was me.  My attitude towards people was in dire need of change, it was far worse than the behavioral modification I wanted to impose on those who didn't re-rack their weights.

Jesus had a lot to say to the Pharisees about their attitudes towards people.  He called them white-washed sepulchres, fine looking on the outside but filled with dead men's bones.  He said that murder was more than the physical act of killing people, it involves hating them and speaking evil of them. 

It took about three years for Him to get my attention that the real problem was in me not in others.  I don't need a strategy for dealing with the problem of getting people to re-rack their weights, I need a strategy for dealing with the nasty mess that is in me. 

Paul told the Roman church, " Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect."  Conforming to the world begins at the level of the mind.  I have to learn to think differently about everything if I am to have the mind of Christ.  


The Beatitudes (Matthew 5.1-12) set up Jesus' statement,  “You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled under people's feet."  The teachings in those first twelve verses tell us what salt is and the virtues He extols there are not worldly virtues at all, they are completely counter-cultural.  They do, however, take reality seriously.  They tell us that we aren't to accept the way things are, we are to mourn that fact, to be as heart broken over that reality as God is and to pursue the way things ought to be.  


It all begins, however, with pursuing the way things ought to be in my own life.  Until I am ready to see the way things are in my life the way God sees them and to mourn over that, I am not ready to pursue change.  Sometimes it takes a long time for me to see the real need for change because I am a Pharisee.